Notes

Someone asked me last night: If I got a check for $15,000,000, what
would I do? I think he expected a change of lifestyle, splurging on
luxuries, full-time volunteer work for a favorite cause, or even any
of the things that people fantasize about when they buy lottery
tickets or speculate on stocks or gamble in casinos. What would I do
if lots of money showed up on my doorstep?

I wouldn't do anything with the money. Not yet. I'd lock it up in some
(insured?) somewhat liquid form and let it wait while I learned more
about myself and about life.

The things I want can't be bought or rushed. I want to learn how to be
me. I want to deepen relationships, and I want the laughs and tears
and fights and reconciliations that go with that. I want to be part of
a community, both at work and at home. I want to discover the joy of
work and the satisfaction of a job well done. I want to step out of my
comfort zone occasionally, but have a good foundation to build on and
draw strength from. I want to grow into myself.

And someday, when character has been built up brick by brick from the
everyday decisions, then I'll naturally share more and more of my
gifts with the world. I don't know exactly how that will go, but I'm
confident that life will be wonderful.

Some people may think that my dreams are smaller than they were
before. I think my dreams are just different. People like hearing
grand visions of the future. I want to learn how to discern the right
step in the current moment.

Will it really matter if I won't be as famous as I could be, or as
rich as I could be, or as accomplished as I could be? Maybe what
will matter is that I'll be as me as I could be.

Last September, I started automatically tracking my e-mails. Every
time I sent a message to someone already in my addressbook, his or her
contact record would be updated with the date and subject of the
message. I also made it easy to note that I met someone in person or
that I talked to them on the phone, although this wasn't automatic.

So now I have almost a year of contact information in my address book.
I was curious—whom haven't I talked to in a year?

Here are some numbers:

I've contacted 396 people in my addressbook since January 1, 2007.

In the past 365 days (2006.09.07 - 2007.09.07), I've contacted 670
people in my address book.

93 people have a contact timestamp (maybe the day I met them), but I
haven't contacted them in the past 365 days. This breaks down to 37
people I haven't contacted since 2006, 32 people I haven't contacted
since 2005, and 24 from 2004 or earlier.

1230 records do not have any contact timestamp. Some of these are
bots, some of these are duplicate records I still haven't gotten
around to merging, others are contacts from before I started tracking
and I haven't e-mailed or talked to them since.

I figured this out by writing a bit of Emacs Lisp to print a
hyperlinked list of contacts with the date of last contact. This was
then very easy to sort using M-x sort-lines and M-x reverse-region.

For example, here are the people I've e-mailed in the last seven days:

Yes, I do weird things. Next step for this one: Review the list, see
who I haven't talked to in one year, and decide who I want to get back
in touch with. Also, analyze my e-mail and come up with pretty graphs.

Random Emacs symbol: gnus-server-kill-server - Command: Kill the server on the current line.

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Page: 2007.09.07

Updated: 2007-09-1021:45:3321:45:33-0400

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